Julie Sheehan

Book of Hours

“Vampirish,” clinicians
say, his pallor a gouache,
white pigment with clay,and because her habit now is spotting
symptoms,and because her patient four year old can’t count
his leukocytes yet,she’ll ready him for better blood, transfuse
her hectic Subaru into NICU,and add more miles to the busted
odometer.

Money, like language, aloof from its bearer,
has talents and dowries, uncommon lexicons.
Language, like money, endows but the few of us,
vampires who palliate, vampires who frighten.

Gouache lays on the
surface of the paper,
so she laughsa lively dragonsblood, to illuminate the letter Sin the alphabet book she’s handed him
for the long ride back to the ward.

Leukemia Mom keeps
a packed bag on the dresserwhere pothos once thrived, a flourished
initialhistoriated to tell its tale: The junk drawer is inoperable,
due to overduebills bloating it shut. As if ported through the white
ceramic knob circulate the grisaille logos of clinicsand canonical
text obscure as Latin. This is NOTa
Bill Amount You Owe. Let them fight amongst themselves,the older
envelopes torn open, the newborns, sealed.

Money, like chemo, attacks cells to save them.
Chemo, like money, has rendered him vampirish.
Vampirish chemo, collectors, and pallor,

and vampirish father—he left in the lurch,
yet lingers at borders, a Book of her Hours.
He’s bound for the portable. He’s made to move.

*

The father settles
in earshot, a visit rare as ultramarine.He thinks she’s
spendthrifting. He says, “Goto work.” He says, “Why do you need two
pots to piss in, ten gallons of gas, a day off?”He drives a luxury
automobile. He admitspaternity. He won’t sign the paper.After
the vomit, the trots, the tarry stool,he grills her on the new bed
sheets.He plants twenty bucks on the dresser.

*

Only the very
wealthy could afford a Book of Hours;only they could afford
devotion.

Not so, not so, she rails,
for here is the illuminator who fills the vellum
with bas de page and roundels,
who sets the gesso
for the gold leaf halo;
here is the scribe, his gall-nut inks and reed,
his exemplar propped up,
half-uncial at hand;
here is the lowly parchmenter
who scuds and dries and stretches
the calfskin upon the herse.
They do not lack for devotion, this company.
They do not lack for hours.
Clinicians might even say they exhibit a pathology
of devotion, rapidly dividing.

Division of labor,
division of time, the Book of Hoursdescribes a privacy, away from
congregations,away from the monitors, the rounds, the priests
of a Children’s Wingwhere a boy
endures a spinal tap, his ninth,behind a parchment curtain,and
his mother pats his saffron hair.

Money, like prayer, seeks out the advantage
of prayer, like money, an unstable currency.
Vampirish prayers, collectors, and chemo
yield vampirish pallor, the root of all evil.

*

Will the boy live?
Language and money speak only through bodies.Will the father
withdraw?
To erase parchment, soak it in milk and scrape with a lunellum.How
will the mother perform her devotions?
The son on his bed sheet, the figures on envelopes,
the miniature in pigments, the miniature in clay.

Julie Sheehan

Cashier

Tucking her snow-white shirt into skinny jeans,
she hitch hikes or wades to Waldbaum’s. A mile remainsitself, she’s
noticed, even when it rainsand rides dry up. She pokes her way, her
fern-greenPleather purse an improvised umbrella.She can’t afford
denial at her age,or dental, either, or the self-help mileageput
on in a jobless recovery. “Helluvajob,” denies the headline. Would
she had a stoolto ease her feet, but, no, her shift is to stand
like an egret, one foot up to nurse bad knees.She breaks for fish
sticks. The manager who’llcover nods from his high seat of command,
ever alert to workers in the weeds.

JULIE SHEEHAN's three poetry collections
are Bar Book, Orient Point and Thaw. A Whiting
Writers’ Award winner, her poems have appeared in many magazines and
anthologies, including Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New
Yorker, Parnassus, Prairie Schooner, The Best American Poetry, and Good
Poems, American Places. She teaches in and directs the MFA program
at Stony Brook Southampton.